A couple of months ago I glanced at but never read a New Yorker piece, authored by Paul Elie, called “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?“. Until a friend shared the below tweet this morning I didn’t realize that O’Connor has been posthumously terminated. She died in 1965 at age 39. I’ve visited her childhood home in Savannah a couple of times. Her racist views were hateful, of course, but there was more to her than just that failing. A moot point now. She’s being aggressively forgotten as we speak. If a person is willing to buy her portrait only to burn it…
Here’s an 8.17 Quillette piece — “Flannery O’Connor and the Ideological War on Literature” by Charlotte Allen — that offers a less condemning assessment.
